50 shades of gray (Nico's hair, anyway)
by thelittlelioness
Summary: Under the influence of the Aphrodite cabin, Nico resorts to extreme measures to impress Percy. Crack.


**50 shades of gray (Nico's hair, anyway)**

The year Nico di Angelo and Percy Jackson crossed lives had been a stressful one. (Not that any other year was any less stressful, but.)

The Hunters of Artemis were not always the friendliest of people-sometimes, they could be a pain in the ass. (But only if you are male, of course.) On top of that, Percy had to deal with sneaking, unwanted, into a quest. Mostly, though, the missing goddess and best-friend-maybe-more had been enough to turn a few hairs prematurely gray.

And that it did.

Years later, both Percy and Annabeth still have their gray streaks. Maybe if they weren't too busy losing their memories and trekking through Tartarus and saving the world they would be more concerned with appearing as a hipster to those not in the know of their heroic acts. Gray hair was sure becoming trendy.

Under normal circumstances, Nico would be repulsed by this fad. The fact that he was about sixty years older than most people he knew from either of the camps only made him even more of a freak. Dying his hair gray would just be proclaiming his abnormally old age, and there is literally nothing appealing to that.

So Nico would have gone his whole life without having silvery hair had it not been for Percy Jackson. Fucking Percy Jackson, the boy who stole his heart the first time he saw him, at a physical age of ten.

Nico di Angelo is definitely not an expert in the decorum of 21st century social customs. You see, he spent most of his life communicating with only his mother and sister. Later came spending time with the Greek god of the dead and a shitload of ghosts and spirits. Hell, even spending a month/several decades in a magical (that's magical in the least positive form of the word) hotel is a bit disorienting. You try going from the 1940s to the 2000s as a ten year old. To Nico, queer is still an offensive term, and he comprehends few of the pop culture references thrown his way. (Who is Han Solo? And what the actual fuck does "Beam me up, Scotty" mean? Nico doesn't know anyone named Scotty. Nor does he understand when Piper quotes what is apparently The Breakfast Club. Maybe the next time he's hanging around his father's palace in the Underworld, he'll request Netflix, whatever that is. At least Hazel is confused as well to these types of things, so it's not just Nico looking uncultured. Not that Hazel is uncultured or anything.)

Anyway. So Nico doesn't quite know what is socially acceptable in this century. Times really have changed from the mid-twentieth, and after watching a marathon of bad sitcoms and exaggerated rom-coms on a motel television, he has a pretty warped sense of how modern teenagers court one another.

The children of Aphrodite take advantage of this.

They spy, and snoop, and pry, because a reliable, unnamed source let it drop that there was some secrets to be had about the son of Hades. And while he doesn't exactly look it on the outside, Nico is super duper gay, they find. (The Aphrodite kids are beyond stereotyping, though. They know that appearances can be deceiving, and that to find the full truth, one must look past the surface.)

But more than that: Nico is super duper gay for Percy Jackson.

And, well, that's one bit of gossip too hefty to pass up.

So one day, after the war against Gaea, they approach Mr. Doom and Gloom about a potential way to steal the heart of one Perry Johansson.

Maybe Nico's delusional, maybe he's desperate, or maybe he's simply drugged (You can blame Drew for that one), but he accepts their proposition.

So, in short, that is how Nico finds himself in the Beauty Room of the Aphrodite cabin (yes, that is seriously what they call it, caps and all) with a head full of bleach and aluminum foil.

"Ok! We're going to wash the lightener out now," a perky blonde says and leads Nico to a salon-style hair-rinsing station. "See, we had to leave it on longer to get your hair white. If we just left it at a blond, the yellow tones would negate the silver dye and it would all be for nothing."

Nico can't give any less fucks about hair bleach, but it's for love, so he just nods and continues to sing his favorite punk songs in his head.

After that is over, she carefully paints-there is a brush, no joke, she paints-the silver dye into his hair. Before selecting the particular shade, she examines a picture of Mr. Hot and Watery taken the year he acquired the gray streak.

"Ok, just gotta leave this for a while. Most of my siblings are at archery practice, and I have to do some cleaning up around the bunks, so you have the room to yourself. Feel free to, like, watch soap operas or jerk off or eat a jar of Nutella. I don't care, do what you want, but don't leave this room, got it?"

Nico nods, and then nods off to sleep. The pastel color palette of the whole cabin has been giving him a pounding headache. Although jerking off to fantasies of Percy does seem tempting.

When the time comes, Perky Blonde reenters the Beauty Room. She washes the dye out and adds some other stuff to his hair. Nico doesn't know what it is, but it smells of coconuts and makes his hair soft.

At the end of the process, she brings him over to the good mirror, the one that has goddess-quality lighting.

Nico is a transformed man-er, well, boy. He's only fourteen, after all. But damn. Perky Blonde gives some passing remark that if he weren't extremely homosexual and she were into guys who listened to Green Day and Pierce the Veil, she would so be attracted to him with that hair.

A vibrant mix of titanium, silver, and gunmetal gray, his hair perfectly resembles that which is only a clump on Percy's head.

With the confidence of a Big Three god, Nico walks from the Aphrodite cabin to number three. Abandoning his thirties-born manners, he enters without knocking. Immediately he announces, "Percy, my hair is gray, like part of yours. Have my children."

When Nico actually looks into the cabin, he sees Percy and a blonde he assumes is Annabeth scoodilypooping in the lush water bed of Poseidon's CHB cabin. He is about to jump ship (pun intended) and revel in all his emo feels, but some godly force prevents him from moving.

And that, children, is how Nico di Angelo, Percy Jackson, and Annabeth Chase had their first threesome.


End file.
